The legal names of punishment in Ming law are five punishments: answer, stick, act, flow and death (strangulation and beheading). In addition, the punishment of banishment is further enriched, that is, according to the status of prisoners in the garrison, they are forced to serve hard labor or serve as non-commissioned officers.
At first, the purpose of banishment was to enrich the frontier defense, and there was no mileage regulation. Later, different mileage was gradually stipulated. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, it was divided into five types: polar, smoky, remote, frontier and coastal, also known as the "five armies", with the farthest distance of 4,000 Li and the nearest distance of 1,000 Li. The period of exile can be divided into "life" (that is, until the death of the criminal) and "forever" (that is, after the death of the criminal, the relatives of future generations will continue to exile the army until they are "exhausted". It can be seen that banishment is far heavier than exile.
Conscription system is widely used in Ming law. Forty-six articles were banished from the army in the early Ming Dynasty, and as many as 213 after Jiajing, which was created in the Song and Yuan Dynasties and further institutionalized in the Ming Dynasty. On the one hand, the reason is related to the heavy punishment imposed by the rulers of the Ming Dynasty, and on the other hand, it is closely related to the military system of the Ming Dynasty. The basic organizational system of the Ming army is Wei and Suo. Since Zhu Yuanzhang unified the whole country, in order to consolidate the rule of the new dynasty, "from the capital to the counties, guards were set up" and "the focus was set by those in one county, even those in the county". Generally, there are more than 5,600 people in a guard, and there are thousands and hundreds of households under the guard. The military establishment and garrison system based on health centers established in the Ming Dynasty strengthened centralized rule and made it possible to institutionalize exile.
Zhang Ting System and Extrajudicial Punishment
The Ming Dynasty also established the "Zhang Ting" system and other extremely cruel extra-judicial punishments.
The so-called imperial cudgel is a system of punishing ministers with cudgels before the noon gate and forcing officials to obey the emperor's will completely by violence. The expansion was supervised by Li Si and carried out by the Royal Guard. The scepter can be imposed on any minister, thus showing the unprecedented power of an autocratic emperor. Numerous ministers died in the Ming Dynasty. As early as the eighth year of Hongwu, Tai Su, the minister of punishments, was a mushroom. I wrote to Mao, and I was so moved that I was killed by a court worker. Since then, Zhang Ting has become a common punishment. The most prominent example is the death of 124 officials who used Zhang Ting to "fight for gifts" during the Jiajing period of Sejong. Courtyard officials originated in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and it happened in the Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties. However, in the Ming Dynasty, they developed into a common means to deter officials, far beyond the scope of "governing officials", but abused the tyranny and arrogance of the emperor.
Extrajudicial punishment in the Ming Dynasty, as early as Ming Taizu's first book "Da Gao", listed all kinds of torture, such as beheading, body tattooing and so on. In particular, the most cruel punishment in the year of the year was formally incorporated into the Ming law and became a common means. During the Wuzong period, Liu Jin, an official in charge of power, mastered the West Factory and created a big cangue punishment, weighing 150 Jin. Criminals are often exhausted in a few days, which is no different from the death penalty. After Xi Zong acceded to the throne, he wrote a letter to establish a big cangue, but after Wei Zhongxian was appointed, he created the punishment of breaking the spine, falling fingers and stabbing the heart.
The cruelty of punishment in Ming dynasty reflected the extremely sharp class contradiction in the later period of feudal society, and it was also an extraordinary measure needed to strengthen extreme autocratic rule.